EXPLORE
Humans didn’t need modern technology to figure out that kids tend to look like their parents. Explore this timeline to see how philosophers and scientists throughout the ages tried to explain how traits are passed from generation to generation. Warning: It gets weird.
The Present: We're Less Wrong Now
Before we jump into how wrong many of history's great thinkers were, here's what we know now. A sperm cell and an egg cell each contain half the DNA to make a person. Encoded in that DNA are genes – instructions on how to make everything from eyelids to elbows. Some traits, like height, use a combination of instructions from both parents' DNA. For others, like eye color, one copy can win out over another. And you're stuck with the DNA you have - it doesn't pick up new traits over your lifetime to pass to the next generation.
We just told you DNA doesn’t change over your lifetime, but it’s a little more complicated than that. While the underlying code doesn’t change, your DNA can pick up chemical tags that change how and when its read based on your environment. And those changes can be passed down to future generations.
Your DNA has 6 billion base pairs that code for about 20,000 genes. And also a lot of junk that never gets used.
Step 1: A sperm and egg each contains half the genetic material to make a human - 23 bundles of DNA called chromosomes.
Step 2: A sperm and egg join up to make a zygote. It's just one cell, but has all the instructions it needs to grow into a whole new human.
Step 3: That zygote starts dividing to grow, and each new cell contains all 46 parental chromosomes.
~500-400 BC: It’s All About Dad
In about 500 BC, ancient Greek philosophers like Hippocrates and Pythagoras believed fathers held the answers to heredity. They thought that men’s semen floated around their bodies and collected the essence of their bodies, from their height to physical strength to hair color. That essence would condense into a person in the womb. They also thought that if a person’s body changed, that fluid would record and pass on those changes - so a weightlifting daddy would make a muscular baby.
Yes, that’s the same Pythagoras as from geometry class. He was fascinated by the elegance of triangles and thought babies worked the same way.
How Giraffes Got Their Long Neck
One classic example to illustrate this wrong idea is an explanation for how giraffes got their long neck.
Imagine that way back in history there was a short necked giraffe that finished eating all the easy-to-reach leaves. And so it stretched and stretched and stretched its neck to reach more leaves.
It's body would pick up on the neck stretching, and its child would be born with a slightly longer neck.
And then that child would stretch, and stretch and stretch, and its child would have an even longer neck. And all the way up to giraffes.
These days we know this isn’t true, but it sure was a tempting idea for generations of scientists!
~300 BCE: Wait, What about Women?
A few hundred years later in around 300 BC, Aristotle pointed out that some kids also look like their moms and grandmas, and that traits like grey hair showed up after somebody made kids, but still made it into the next generation. He introduced the idea that it might be instructions that are passed along instead of a physical template, a blueprint rather than bricks. But he did stick to the idea that info got captured by semen and menses floating around the body.
Aristotle also thought that the father provided the baby’s spirit, or pneuma, which would power up the rest of its organs
It’s getting hot in here! Aristotle believed that temperature played a role in determining if the baby would be a boy or girl. That’s not how human sex determination works, but it’s true for reptiles! Warm nest temperatures make sea turtles female, and cold temperatures make them male.
Aristotle did some of the first recorded observations of embryo development by partially opening chicken eggs and watching the heart beat.
1000: We Inherit More than Good Looks
Father of surgery Al-Zahrawi wrote an enormous encyclopedia on medicine around 1000. He also wrote the first detailed record we have of a hereditary disease, which is an illness that is passed along in a family. Now we know that disease - a clotting disorder called hemophilia - is more common in men than in women because it’s linked to the X chromosome. If one of a woman’s X chromosomes has the hemophilia mutation, she has a backup and will avoid most of the symptoms. But if she passes that mutated copy to her son, he will have hemophilia. Colorblindness is another sex linked trait.
Hemophilia became well known in the 1800s when it became common in Europe’s royal families due to generations of inbreeding
If a man has a disease-causing gene on his x-chromosome, he will have the disease.
If he has a baby with a woman who doesn't have that broken gene, any boy they have will be disease free, because he does not pass on the damaged X chromosome.
But if they have a daughter, he will pass on that disease-causing gene. The baby girl won't have the illness, because she has a backup copy of the X chromosome from her mother that can compensate.
Now, each time that daughter has a baby, she has a 50% chance of passing on the damaged x chromosome.
That means her sons have a 50% chance of having the disease, but her daughters will just have a 50% chance of being a carrier like her. They'd only have the disease if their father also passed on a damaged copy.
1600s: Honey, We Shrunk the Kids?
When Antonie van Leeuwenhoek vastly improved the microscope in the 1600s and observed living cells for the first time, humanity started to understand we are made up of tiny parts. And then we jumped to the conclusion that we’re so complex that the only way we could make something as complicated as a baby human was if it was already put together and just needed to grow. This miniature human was called a homonculus, and scientists thought it was fully pre-formed inside either a sperm cell or an egg cell, and needed just a womb to grow in or a sperm to jump-start.
Much later, in the late 1800s, Hans Driesch’s experiments with sea urchin embryos proved this idea wrong. If he put the sperm and egg together, let them divide once, and then separated them, they each continued to grow into a whole sea urchin. That wouldn’t work if there was a whole being that just needed to grow.
The first record we have of cells is from Roberte Hooke, who looked at cork under a microscope and noticed the texture. Because the cells were dead, they didn’t have any of the other structures inside a living cell.
1800s: Darwin’s Problem
In the 1800s, Charles Darwin had big ideas about how species evolved when natural selection killed off members with bad traits. But he didn’t have a good grasp on how those traits were passed along from parent to child. What he put forth was similar to Hippocrates’s idea - that body parts emit particles that affect eggs and sperm. He called them gemmules, thinking that better body parts produced better gemmules, and that each parents gemmules would blend in a baby. But his theory of evolution kind of needed inherited traits to be stable, unchanging units.
Darwin almost read an excerpt of a paper by Gregor Mendel that would have given him the data he needed to understand this, but he skipped over that page while he was reading.
Another blow to the idea that body parts passed along information came from a scientist who cut off generations of mouse tails to prove that mice were still born with tails.
Darwin's cousin Francis Galton tried to test Darwin's idea by injecting blood from one kind of rabbit into another.
If rabbits really had little particles called gemmules that collected information about their characteristics, transferring those gemmules into another rabbit should make that bunny's babies look different.
Of course, that didn't happen. There are no gemmules, so the rabbit babies looked like their parents, not their 'gemmule' donors.
1800s: Mistakes Were Made
Gregor Mendel was a 19th century monk who liked to tinker in his garden. He bred generations of pea plants and meticulously kept track of each plant’s traits from size to color to seed shape. He observed that parental traits didn’t blend together in a baby pea plant, but appeared and disappeared with mathematical precision. This could have been a breakthrough, demonstrating to the scientific world that traits were passed on in stable units of information, but everyone ignored his work. He even wrote to a scientist he admired for advice, who thought his experiment was dumb and told him to switch to a different kind of plant that happened to be much more complicated.
Mendel pollinated each of his thousands of pea plants by hand, carefully using a paintbrush to transfer the pollen and not contaminate another plant.
The plant Mandel switched to was called hawkweed. The problem is that it reproduces asexually - each baby plant just has its mother’s genes.
Genes flow through generations without blending. Even if a white plant's color is overpowered by a purple partner, that gene still exists and can pop up in the future.
Early 1900s: The Chromosome Shuffle
It took scientists a long time from the discovery of cells to understand which parts of a cell do what. But as microscope technology improved and researchers learned how to stain specific structures within the cell, they started to put the puzzle together. In the early 1900s, several scientists including Theodor Boveri and Walter Sutton watched cells duplicate and discovered chromosomes. Finally, they had linked Mendel’s mathematics about traits to a physical structure in a cell. Further experiments showed that it was DNA in the chromosome, not proteins, that actually carried the genetic code.
Mitosis; root meristem of onion (cells in prophase, anaphase).
A scientist named Thomas Hunt Morgan used fruit fly eye color to show that genes are arranged in a line on a chromosome like beads on a string.
When a cell is about to divide to make a sperm or egg, it lines up its pairs of chromosomes in the middle.
At that point, each chromosome can swap genes with its pair, shuffling the combination of genes on each chromosome in future generations.
1950s: Discovering DNA
To really understand how something works, you have to know what it looks like. Many scientists got almost all the way there but fell short. One figured out the bases stacked flat on top of each other like coins, another almost figured out how the bases paired together, but no one put all the pieces together until the 1950s when James Watson and Francis Crick used data from Rosalin Franklin and other scientists to unveil the elegant double helix. This discovery allowed researchers the first glimpse of how our traits are physically coded in our DNA.
Photo 51, showing x-ray diffraction pattern of DNA
Model of DNA.
1970s: Cracking the Code
Knowing the general shape of DNA is good, but until scientists could read the code, they couldn’t make a lot of progress in understanding how our genes affect our health and lives. At first, it was slow. One of the first published DNA sequences was just 24 base pairs long and took the team two full years in the 1970s. But by the late 1980s, computers could read 1000 base pairs a day. Once they could read the sequence of a gene, scientists still had to figure out what it does.
When a scientist wants to know what a gene does in the body, they often will genetically engineer an animal with a broken version of that gene. If they figure out what goes wrong when the gene is broken, they can learn its function.
DNA sequences: One gene in the 1970s.
DNA sequences: Up to the 32 billion basepairs in an axlotl in 2018.
1990s: Putting it All Together
In the early 1990s, the international community came together to sequence the entire human genome, all 3 billion base pairs. Techniques for computerized gene sequencing got faster and faster and they finished in 2003. Over the last 20 years, the cost of sequencing a genome has dropped from more than $100 million to just $1,000. And now, scientists are learning to quickly and accurately change DNA, perhaps in the future allowing them to cure many genetic disorders.
Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier designed a new tool called CRISPR-Cas9 that works like a scissors to cut and edit DNA, allowing scientists to make quick, accurate changes to DNA inside a cell.
The Human Genome project wasn’t just a cool milestone to hit. It’s still used by genetic testing companies and researchers today as a scaffold. They can take shortcuts in their sequencing by using the reference genome as a template.
Each human’s DNA is less than 1% different than any other human. So while the Human Genome project doesn’t capture every possible genetic difference, it covers almost everything.
The cost of DNA sequencing over time.
FAQs
History of The Gene Interactive | The Gene | Ken Burns | PBS? ›
The series tells the story of the rapid evolution of genetic science from Gregor Mendel's groundbreaking experiment in the 19th century to CRISPR, and the hope that newfound powers to alter DNA with pinpoint precision will transform the treatment of some of the world's most complex and challenging diseases.
What is the educational movie about DNA? ›DNA: The Secret of Life chronicles James Watson and Francis Crick's 1953 revolutionary scientific breakthrough—the discovery of the double helix.
What happened in the gene episode 1? ›Part 1 begins in 1864, when George Mendel, living in a monastery in the Czech Republic, runs experiments in his flower garden. He is experimenting on pea shoots, and he wants to understand what makes plants and growing things the way they are.
When was the first gene mutation discovered? ›In 1941 genetic mutations causing errors in specific steps in metabolic pathways was shown by George Wells Beadle and Edward Lawrie Tatum and the "one gene" hypothesis was formed.
Who discovered that some genes are activated and some are turned off? ›Francois Jacob and Jacque Monod, working out of an attic laboratory in Paris, first explored the mechanisms for turning genes on and off 50 years ago. They studied gene regulation in bacteria and discovered that sugars in the food supply turn on the genes required for their own digestion.
What is the documentary on Netflix about DNA test? ›A new documentary about an unsettling story. Inside the sinister true story of Donald Cline. Director Lucie Jourdan discusses the “story of consent” at the heart of the documentary.
What is the Netflix movie about DNA testing? ›After a woman's at-home DNA test reveals multiple half-siblings, she discovers a shocking scheme involving donor sperm and a popular fertility doctor.
What is the summary of the gene on PBS? ›The series tells the story of the rapid evolution of genetic science from Gregor Mendel's groundbreaking experiment in the 19th century to CRISPR, and the hope that newfound powers to alter DNA with pinpoint precision will transform the treatment of some of the world's most complex and challenging diseases.
What did gene do in true story? ›Does Gene die in True Story? Unfortunately, Gene, Kid's biggest fan, dies in True Story after getting wrapped up and in way too deep. Gene follows Kid and Carlton that night that they dump the body. He also films the whole thing.
Does gene delete the video in true story? ›Gene eventually agrees to delete the video but Carlton still feels uneasy about how much he knows.
What is the oldest known gene? ›
The oldest known functioning gene is found in the enzyme glutamine synthetase, which has a vital role in cells. The genes in a modern human don't all date back to a single point in our history.
What was the first human gene clone? ›On Dec. 27, 2002, the group announced that the first cloned baby — named Eve — had been born the day before. By 2004, Clonaid claimed to have successfully brought to life 14 human clones.
What was the first human disease gene cloned? ›A group from Boston Children's Hospital isolated the CGD gene on Xp21. The genes for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and retinoblastoma followed quickly.
Who discovered gene manipulation? ›1973: Biochemists Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen develop genetic engineering by inserting DNA from one bacteria into another. 1982: FDA approves the first consumer GMO product developed through genetic engineering: human insulin to treat diabetes.
Who is the father of gene theory? ›Gregor Mendel: the 'father of genetics'
Who is the father of gene technology? ›Abstract. The Nobel laureate Paul Berg initiated genetic manipulation and pioneered genetic engineering. He was also one of the initiators of setting up guidelines for carrying out recombinant DNA experiments. He was an innovative scientist and cared for the impact of science on society.
Which doctor uses his own sperm for IVF Netflix? ›Netflix's Our Father Tells The True Story of a Fertility Doctor Who Used His Own Sperm on Patients. During the 1970s and '80s, a fertility specialist in Indiana named Dr. Donald Cline inseminated dozens of patients with his own sperm, without their knowledge or consent.
What movie did the doctor use his own sperm for IVF? ›“Our Father” tells the unsettling story about Dr. Donald Cline, a former Indiana fertility doctor who used his own sperm to impregnate his patients without their knowledge.
What movie does the doctor use his own sperm for IVF? ›Cecil Jacobson Story (also released as Seeds of Deception) is a 1994 American made-for-television drama film directed by Arlene Sanford. The film is based on the true story of Cecil Jacobson, who used his own sperm to impregnate patients, without informing them.
What movie is DNA modification in human? ›Gattaca is a 1997 science fiction film produced in the US that depicts a future society that uses reproductive technology and genetic engineering in order to produce genetically enhanced human beings.
What happened with the DNA test in serial? ›
Baltimore prosecutors on Tuesday dropped the charges against Adnan Syed, the subject of the popular podcast “Serial,” and apologized for the 23 years he spent in prison for a wrongful murder conviction, after another round of DNA tests cleared Syed from involvement in a 1999 killing.
What is the movie about editing DNA? ›Gattaca (1997) - IMDb.
Why is gene therapy controversial? ›The idea of these germline alterations is controversial. While it could spare future generations in a family from having a particular genetic disorder, it might affect the development of a fetus in unexpected ways or have long-term side effects that are not yet known.
What was the Crispr baby scandal? ›The two girls grew from embryos He had modified using CRISPR-Cas9, which he said would make them resistant to HIV. His work was widely condemned by the scientific community, which decried the experiment as medically unnecessary and ethically irresponsible. He received a three-year jail sentence in 2019.
Who is the mother of all genes? ›In human genetics, the Mitochondrial Eve (also mt-Eve, mt-MRCA) is the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all living humans.
Why did gene run away from Leper? ›Leper suddenly begins sobbing and tells Gene of his odd hallucinations at training camp: officers' faces turned into women's faces, soldiers carrying detached limbs, and so on. Eventually, Gene cannot bear to listen to Leper any longer and runs away into the snowy fields.
Why did gene go to hospital? ›After “Smokes”, we get the events of “Nippy”. In “Smokes”, Saul (now Gene Takovic) suffers a heart attack while working at the Cinnabon store in the Cottonwood Mall. He is rushed to the hospital. But when he is brought back, the cabbie (whom we see in this episode as well), recognizes him as Saul from the billboards.
Why did gene cry? ›Gene bursts out crying, mostly "because of kindness, which [he] had not expected." But when Dr. Stanpole tells him that Phineas has asked for him (for Gene), Gene sobers right up.
What is the plot of True Story? ›A world-famous comedian desperately searches for a way out after a night in Philadelphia with his brother threatens to sabotage more than his success. Watch all you want. Kevin Hart and Wesley Snipes star in this twisty crime thriller executive produced by Hart and Eric Newman ("Narcos").
What happened at the end of True Story? ›As it turns out, the whole situation was a scheme concocted by Carlton to get more money out of Kid. This is what led Kid to shoot and kill his brother in an attempt to stop the cycle of exploitation and deceit.
What did the wink mean in True Story? ›
After he is sentenced, he winks at Finkel, who, to his shock and rage, realizes Longo has been lying throughout their conversations, using him to make his testimony more believable.
What is the rarest gene? ›- Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria Syndrome (HGPS) Frequency: Occurs in 1 in 4 million newborns worldwide. ...
- Alkaptonuria. Frequency: Occurs in 1 in 250,000 -1,000,000 live births. ...
- Ribose-5-phosphate isomerase deficiency. ...
- Ogden syndrome. ...
- KAT6A syndrome.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
What nationality has the oldest DNA? ›NEW YORK (AP) — Scientists discovered the oldest known DNA and used it to reveal what life was like 2 million years ago in the northern tip of Greenland.
Who was the first human clone baby? ›On Dec. 27, 2002, Brigitte Boisselier held a press conference in Florida, announcing the birth of the first human clone, called Eve.
Did Clonaid clone a human? ›Clonaid has not shown verifiable evidence of any human cloning, despite claims that they would do this within days of their initial announcement.
Are there human clones today? ›1 No one has ever cloned a human being, though scientists have cloned animals other than Dolly, including dogs, pigs, cows, horses and cats.
How old is Eve the clone? ›Clonaid claims that Eve is a clone of a 31-year-old American woman who had donated her dna.
Why is human cloning banned? ›The main reason for this is the conviction that the deliberate production of genetically identical human beings violates the dignity and integrity of human beings, both as individuals and as members of the human species.
When was human cloning banned? ›108-18 - HUMAN CLONING PROHIBITION ACT OF 2003 | Congress.gov | Library of Congress.
What happened to China's gene-edited babies? ›
A third gene-edited child was born a year later. Now, the disgraced gene-editing scientist, who was imprisoned in China for three years for the unethical practices, tells the South China Morning Post that all three children are doing well. “They have a normal, peaceful, and undisturbed life,” He says.
Who went to jail for CRISPR? ›MARTIN: Lulu and Nana, the world's first gene-edited babies, were created in secret in China by He Jiankui. He was later sentenced to three years in prison for, quote, "illegal medical practices," unquote. And now that he's out, rather than lying low, he is back in the business of editing genes.
Who was the first CRISPR human? ›The first patient in the trial received a dose of the experimental drug, called AGN-151587, via an injection in the eye. The idea is that it delivers the gene-editing tool CRISPR directly to cells in the eye which are affected by the genetic disease.
Who is the father of multiple gene inheritance? ›Gregor Mendel's principles of inheritance form the cornerstone of modern genetics.
Who discovered mutations? ›Hugo de Vries is the father of mutation theory. His arguments in favor of mutation and its role in evolution were very influential.
What are the 3 Mendel laws? ›Mendel's laws include the Law of Dominance and Uniformity, the Law of Segregation, and the Law of Independent Assortment.
What was the first known gene transfer? ›Discovery that a whitefly uses a stolen plant gene to elude its host's defences may offer a route to new pest-control strategies. A pernicious agricultural pest owes some of its success to a gene pilfered from its plant host millions of years ago.
What is the history of gene editing? ›The origin of genome editing technology began with the introduction of zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs). Zinc finger nucleases are artificially engineered restriction enzymes for custom site-specific genome editing. Zinc fingers themselves are transcription factors, where each finger recognizes 3–4 bases.
What is the history of gene transformation? ›History. Transformation was first demonstrated in 1928 by Frederick Griffith, an English bacteriologist searching for a vaccine against bacterial pneumonia. Griffith discovered that a non virulent strain of Streptococcus pneumoniae could be transformed into a virulent one by exposure to strains of virulent S.
What is the movie about evolution in schools? ›Inherit the Wind is a fictionalized account of the 1925 Scopes "Monkey" Trial, which took place between July 10 and July 21, 1925, and resulted in John T. Scopes's conviction for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution to a high school science class, contrary to a Tennessee state law.
What is the movie about mixing human and animal DNA? ›
The story concerns experiments in genetic engineering being done by a young scientific couple, who attempt to introduce human DNA into their work of splicing animal genes resulting in the creation of a human–animal hybrid. Guillermo del Toro, Don Murphy, and Joel Silver are the executive producers of this film.
What is the movie about the DNA fingerprint? ›The story of Sir Alec Jeffreys' discovery of DNA fingerprinting and its first use by DCS David Baker in catching a double murderer. The story of Sir Alec Jeffreys' discovery of DNA fingerprinting and its first use by DCS David Baker in catching a double murderer.
What is the movie with the genius kids trying to get into a school? ›Gifted is a 2017 American drama film directed by Marc Webb and written by Tom Flynn. It stars Chris Evans, Mckenna Grace, Lindsay Duncan, Jenny Slate and Octavia Spencer.
Is it still illegal to teach evolution in Tennessee? ›Consequently, the Court held that the ban on the teaching of evolution did not violate the Establishment Clause, because it did not establish one religion as the "State religion." As a result of the holding, the teaching of evolution remained illegal in Tennessee, and continued campaigning succeeded in removing ...
What is the movie about school brainwashing students? ›'Stolen Youth': Heartbreaking Hulu doc details how Sarah Lawrence students fell under the spell of a cruel manipulator.
Why was evolution banned in the 1920s? ›In the 1920s, some religious fundamentalists charged that teaching evolution was destroying people's faith in God and in the Bible. The Scopes monkey trial of 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, focused on the issue of whether the theory of evolution should be taught in public schools.
What is the movie where humans can't reproduce? ›The film's source, P. D. James' novel The Children of Men (1992), describes what happens when society is unable to reproduce, using male infertility to explain this problem.
Can humans breed with any other animals? ›Ethical considerations preclude definitive research on the subject, but it's safe to say that human DNA has become so different from that of other animals that interbreeding would likely be impossible.
What Disney movie does a human turn into an animal? ›By the very narrowest of margins, Disney's The Emperor's New Groove, perhaps divisively, comes out ahead of Spirited Away. Emperor Kuzco (David Spade) is transformed into a llama by the villainous ex-advisor Yzma (Eartha Kitt) and her henchman Kronk (Patrick Warburton).
What is the movie about altering DNA? ›Although critically acclaimed, Gattaca was not a box office success, but it is said to have crystallized the debate over the controversial topic of human genetic engineering.
What crime story was solved by DNA? ›
California cold case solved thanks to DNA taken from 1994 Washington sexual assault kit. Harold W. Carpenter, 63, a suspect in the 1979 cold case murder of Patricia Carnahan in El Dorado County, has been arrested after investigators found a DNA match for an unrelated crime in Washington state.
What is touch DNA and why is it controversial? ›Touch DNA, also known as Trace DNA, is a forensic method for analyzing DNA left at the scene of a crime. It is called "touch DNA" because it only requires very small samples, for example from the skin cells left on an object after it has been touched or casually handled, or from footprints.
What movie has a smart kid with autism? ›Mercury Rising (1998) A brilliant 9-year-old autistic boy becomes a target for assassins after he breaks a top government code. An undercover FBI agent finds the boy hiding in his closet and protects him.
What is the movie with the girl math genius? ›In this wonderfully moving film, a single man (Chris Evans) strives to give his child prodigy niece (Mckenna Grace) a normal life, despite interference from the girl's grandmother.
What is the movie about a black genius girl? ›| Hidden Figures | |
|---|---|
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release dates | December 10, 2016 (SVA Theatre) December 25, 2016 (United States) |
| Running time | 127 minutes |
| Country | United States |